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👋 Welcome to the 153rd issue of Open Loops, a weekly letter on clarity, growth, and building a life that feels like yours.
My name is Reza, and each week I share what I'm reading, building, and working through to help you turn confusion into conviction in life and work.
☁️ On my mind
We spend one-third of our lives working.
Nearly 90,000 hours.
To do work that matters, it’s important to ask:
How much are you learning?
What are you doing that only you can do best?
How much of your work is in alignment with your personal values?
Would people miss what you do if you stopped doing it tomorrow?
What are you trying to change? What does change mean to you?
Do you wake up everyday excited to keep adding to what you built yesterday?
You might not know the answer to all of them, but it’s important to keep questioning…
They’lll bring you more clarity. And get you gradually closer to working on the right things.
🔗 4 links
You can walk the same ten minutes to the train and arrive with a head full of other people's arguments, OR arrive having noticed that it's about to rain… Same walk, completely different day. Ask Polly
Most of the highlights you saved this year you've never opened once, and that's fine, because a book that changed you doesn't need to be remembered to have worked. The better test is whether anything you do looks different. Dan Koe
Someone asks for fifteen minutes to pick your brain, someone else marks an email urgent, and by Wednesday your week belongs to everybody but you. The better move is deciding what gets a place on the calendar before the requests arrive. Ness Labs
The most interesting version of your life five years out is invisible from here, because the pieces it gets built from don't exist yet. A five-year plan can only aim you at what you can already picture. Sahil Bloom
🧵 From Threads this week
📱 From the feed
Starting to share some of the raw lessons from working in the trenches last 12 years…
💬 One quote
Always be a first rate version of yourself and not a second rate version of someone else.
📚 One book
This week's book is The Power of Your Subconscious Mind, by Joseph Murphy.
It's an old one, heavy on prayer and affirmations, and it repeats itself. I read it for a single idea rather than the packaging: the mind you talk to all day is building the life you'll live in.
A few that stuck with me:
The sentence you repeat about yourself all week is the one you're training yourself to believe. Worth hearing what you've been repeating.
Your mind doesn't catch the joke in "I'm such an idiot." It just files it.
The charm in your pocket has no power. Believing in it changes how you show up, and that's the part doing the work.
Someone's remark takes five seconds. The replay you run for
the next hour is the part that costs you.
Check out my full bookshelf note on The Power of Your Subconscious Mind.
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❓ One question
Who have you known the longest, and when did you last ask them something you didn't already know the answer to?
Till next time 👋
🤝 Should we work together?
This newsletter is where I think out loud each week. The rest of my work is with people at real inflection points: Clarity Coaching for life and career decisions, and GTM advisory for startups that need a sharper story and a launch with more shape.
✨ Get Foundation 33 for free
Foundation 33 is my curated list of 33 books for clarity, identity, and building a life that feels like yours. A good place to start if you want a more intentional reading path.
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